Fear of Mirrors
By Tariq Ali
Arcadia, 1998
239 pp., $24.95 (pb)
Review by Phil Shannon
Everyone, from his ex-lover to his son, seems to be giving Vladimir Meyer the same advice: "Stop living in the past! Wake up! Marxism is dead!".
The wall is down, the German Democratic Republic is no more but Professor Meyer, a socialist dissident in the old East Germany, is unimpressed with the noisy "free market" triumphalism which glibly equates the end of the Stalinist Eastern European states with the bankruptcy of socialism.
Tariq Ali's latest novel ambitiously takes on the international history of 20th century socialism from its initial years of great drama and hope to its ugly and bloody betrayal by Stalin and the ranks of state and party bureaucrats that he represented.
Vladimir Meyer is saved by his Marxist politics from being "blinded by the flashes emanating from the Western videosphere" as the Stalinist East German state crumbles. He had tried to propagate a humane and democratic socialism through an underground dissident movement in the GDR. Now he tries to enlighten his son, Karl, a young and impatiently anti-Marxist apparatchik of the SPD (the German ALP), about the lives, motivations and dreams of those who had worked for the socialist cause, for better and, often enough for some of them, for worse.
The novel is populated with a large cast of socialists. They include Ludwick, the fearless and principled Comintern agent who debates whether to break with Stalin as the Comintern degenerates from the majestic headquarters for an international communist movement into the instrument of foreign policy for Stalin's Russia and the bureau for wiping out Stalin's left-wing opponents across the globe.
Vladimir's mother, Gertrude, was a clandestine anti-Nazi worker for the German Communist Party, who made the fatal error of identifying socialism with Stalin's state and spied for Stalin to the very end, including winning and then betraying the confidence of her son's dissident group.
Vladimir's friend and one-time student Sao, a former Vietnamese resistance fighter, now a wealthy spiv buying arms from the Russian military and secrets from the former KGB to sell for a profit.
Some sell their soul to Stalin in misguided efforts to ensure the survival of "soviet" Russia at all costs, others take the oppositional road of Trotsky and pay for it with persecution.
These men and women were all initially inspired by socialist ideals and were part of a global political movement which Vladimir's son, entranced by Bundesbank reports and the flashing financial indices of the German market, cannot comprehend.
"For most of this century", says Vladimir, "there have been millions who have thought lofty thoughts ... and were prepared to sacrifice their own future for a better world". But for Karl, none of this matters. The fall of the Wall buried socialism for good. People like his father who continue to believe in Marxism and to hope for socialism are incurable romantics unable to adapt to reality.
But "why should one come to terms with the present?", argues Vladimir. Such an attitude leads to passivity, and acquiescence in the money-grubbing drabness and injustice of capitalism. "The bureaucratic command economy system was over but its demise did not mean that what survived was superior or preferable", he says.
Vladimir has the best of the arguments, though these impress themselves more as statements by Ali the Marxist author than as a convincing outcome of the interplay of characters.
Ali's novel struggles to consistently engage the reader. Character development is sometimes light and there is a confusing clutter of cameo characters.
Tariq Ali has the heart but not quite the talent of Victor Serge, the libertarian Bolshevik writer whose lyrical and allusive style, and exquisite use of language, profoundly captures the tragedy, resilience and hope of the socialist experiences of our century. His men and women have heroic grandeur, and human weaknesses, as they fought for a noble and egalitarian world against the grim inhumanity of the "free" market and "soviet" bureaucracy.
Although not of the same literary calibre as Serge, Ali the veteran revolutionary has written a worthwhile novel which valiantly tries to save socialism from its Stalinist "friends" as much as its capitalist enemies.